Torsh Development Team Launches Enhanced Exemplar Library on TALENT

by Shaun Herron,
June 23rd 2017

We are always looking for ways to fine-tune Torsh TALENT, our platform for teacher professional development. As you might expect, our clients provide some of the most valuable input on how TALENT can better meet their needs. We can’t implement each and every suggestion, but we do our best to give each idea its due diligence.

Just yesterday, we launched a new and improved version of our Exemplar Library that was a direct result of client feedback. Building Excellent Schools, a national nonprofit that strives to improve academic outcomes for underserved students, approached us with suggestions to make the Exemplar Library a more valuable and useful tool. The development team got to work bringing these ideas to fruition, and the new version went live yesterday.

So what’s different?

The Exemplar Library is now able to accept not just videos, but almost any type of file. Examples include PDFs, Excel files, Word documents, PowerPoint decks, etc. Regardless of format, teachers' best practices, how to’s, lesson plans, presentations, curriculum materials and other artifacts can be posted directly into the Exemplar Library.

Of course, we still expect the Exemplar Library to contain many videos, and we want these videos to be as useful as possible. Therefore comments, rubric tags, supporting documents, and more can be transferred over with the video when publishing in the Exemplar Library. This eliminates the need to re-upload files, copy over comments, and otherwise repeat the hard work you've already done.

We renamed “Channels,” which will now be called “Exemplar Collections.” And these collections are nestable, meaning subfolders can be created easily to better organize, and specify, the materials they contain.

Each week, every member of the Torsh team -- not just the tech team but marketing, sales, account services, and finance -- sets aside his or her work to participate in a development call. Among other topics, we review client requests, and discuss the pros and cons of any changes we hope to implement. That’s how the request from Building Excellent Schools was brought to our attention. They use the Exemplar Library regularly and recommended enhancements that the entire TALENT community would benefit from.

We want TALENT to be the best and most valuable tool in your PD arsenal. If you have suggestions for how TALENT can improve, reach out to your account manager or send an email to support@torsh.co.